A discursive study of parents’ identity construction in Chinese wedding ceremony

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the categories, strategies, and cultural driving forces behind identity constructions of parents in Chinese weddings, by examining naturally occurring wedding speeches in popular short video and audio-visual platforms. The results reveal that, first, parents as the speechmaker mainly construct the emotion-oriented personal identity, connection-built relational identity, and sociality-driven interactional identity; second, these identities are primarily constructed through the usage of vocatives, personal indexicals, metaphors, and speech acts (e.g. expressives, declaratives, directives, and commisives). Additionally, the identity construction of parents is deeply motivated by ‘ Li’ as a set of ethical norms in Chinese culture.